http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS lack all of brevity's many virtues, but there is one
great blessing to the long slog. In their length, campaigns are exercises in
clarification. They cumulatively strip away the calculated smog with which
politicians and parties surround themselves. They are democracy's
occasions for learning what we already knew but have been encouraged to
forget.

One truth is that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are in fact
different from each other. The former is liberal; the latter is conservative. A
Democratic administration will reflect a liberal worldview and a Republican
administration will reflect a conservative worldview. Shocking stuff, but
true.

In recent months, under the pressure of both the Gore campaign and the
Rodham-Clinton campaign, the Clinton White House has moved quite a
distance away from the triangulated center it has more or less held since
Dick Morris's post-1994 makeover. The president is a lib again, as he
made abundantly clear when he took a dive in Seattle for labor, the enviros
and the new loony left.

Ever since the White House staggered back from its last lurch to the left,
"don't ask, don't tell" has been policy on gays in the military. Now,
suddenly, the president, the vice president and the first lady have
discovered what has not exactly been a secret: "Don't ask, don't tell"
doesn't really work very well. They are shocked. Whose fool idea was
this, anyway? True, the Clinton-Gores have a proximate cause for their
reawakening: A trial in the murder of a gay soldier has brutally exposed the
realities that "don't ask, don't tell" was designed to mask. But it also seems
likely that, had this trial occurred at a time when Al Gore and Hillary
Clinton were not needful of Democratic-liberal votes, the reaction from the
Clinton-Gores would have been much closer to no reaction at all.

Gore's only challenger in the Democratic presidential primaries is running
unreconstructedly as a liberal. Bill Bradley proposed classically liberal
health care reform and said he would, if necessary, raise taxes to pay for it.
(Gore of course demagogued this statement--Gore would demagogue an
opponent's "hello, how are you?"--but then grudgingly admitted to a
position essentially identical to Bradley's.) On issues of race, Bradley is an
unevolved 1963 liberal. In foreign policy, he seems not to have advanced
his views since he was a member in good standing of the neo-isolationist
left that dominated the congressional Democratic caucus during the
Reagan-Bush years.

And Republicans? Well, they are, it turns out, rather to the right of the
Democrats. In the debate Monday night in Iowa among the six GOP
candidates, two--George W. Bush and Gary Bauer--named the Christian savior
as the most influential thinker in their lives. (Impressively, for him, Bush got
the name right, the last one anyway, on the first shot.) A third, Orrin Hatch,
named Lincoln and Reagan, but threw in Christ for good measure. This
was not just pandering to Iowa's religious right. Throughout the debate, the
Republican candidates spoke of G-d, and the Christian savior, and of the role of
Christian faith in a properly constructed society. And they spoke in
obviously heartfelt, explicitly moralistic terms.

Asked about the killers of Columbine High School, revealed this week in
their horrifically typical devotion to the culture of video murder and Jerry
Springeresque fame, the Republicans blamed a national culture that has
abandoned G-d, parents and teachers who have forgotten their roles as
moral instructors and an entertainment industry that promotes a
pathological disregard for life. Hatch, Bauer, Alan Keyes and Steve
Forbes all argued that legal abortion, which implicitly denies the
proposition that life is created by God and may therefore not be snuffed
out by man, necessarily gives rise to a culture in which all human life is
devalued--to Columbine. "What did we do in America to so undermine the
sanctity of life that we could raise a couple of kids with empty hearts?"
asked Bauer. "I think that part of it is that we undermine the sanctity of life
by telling our children that they've got a constitutional right to take an
innocent life if it's in their way." Democrats, by and large, do not talk like
this.

And they do not talk as John McCain did about the old men of Beijing:
"ruthless people hell-bent on hanging onto power." Or as Forbes did about
the World Trade Organization: "a woolly mammoth without the charm." Or
as Keyes did about campaign finance reform: "The government does not
have the right to restrict our freedom of association, which should include
the right to associate our money with the causes we believe in."

There's a choice, not an echo, out
there.

Michael Kelly is the editor of National Journal. Send your comments to him by clicking here.